


The Path Marked

by Remember When (scribblemyname)



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Marriage Arranged Because of Matching Soulmarks, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, the gods are real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-07-23 23:15:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20016385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/Remember%20When
Summary: "The next king will be my choice, not yours." She smiled then, briefly, not kindly. "The gods have marked me."A soft whisper through the court."My physician shall examine any suitor for the matching mark of Attolia's chosen king."





	The Path Marked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ConvenientAlias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/gifts).



> Special thanks to Prinz for helping me brainstorm this baby.

When the mark showed up, her father ignored it. Irene was destined to be the wife of the new King of Attolia now, and politics and backroom dealing to get what he wanted mattered more than honoring a soulmark sent from the gods they'd never fully believed in.

Irene had enough on her mind without having a soulmark to worry about. She had her country to gain and care for and her own future to secure.

When Teleus shot down the baron contending for her hand, she gained her kingdom. Then she declared, "The next king will be my choice, not yours." She smiled then, briefly, not kindly. "The gods have marked me."

A soft whisper through the court.

"My physician shall examine any suitor for the matching mark of Attolia's chosen king."

* * *

It kept things simple when she ignored the attentions of competing barons. Few applied to her physician. Few wanted to make her rejection real.

* * *

She didn't hang the Thief of Eddis. She had his hand cut off and her physician sent to ensure his survival. She was not pleased that evaluation resulted in the physician requesting a private audience.

"Is he attempting to die to spite me?" she demanded, more harshly than warranted, as soon as they were alone. She would not have what she wished if he died of his wounds, and Eugenides had always tried to deny her what she wanted.

Petrus hesitated, then shook his head. "He is healthy enough for a prisoner, my Queen, who just lost his hand. There's another matter."

Attolia's knuckles went white as she listened, disbelieving—furious. _This_ was whom the gods had chosen? She did not care for the gods, but marks were rare and unmistakable. Marks had to be honored if one did not wish to offend the gods.

She sent her physician away and threw another amphora at the wall to break.

If only a tie such as this would break so easily.

* * *

Eddis was quiet and somber when she read the message from the Queen of Attolia. Attolia's ambassador sweated patiently as he waited for her response.

_I will not return your Thief, for your gods have given him to me and marked him. Do not offend the gods._

There was more, but the message was clear. Withhold the Arachthus and offend the gods.

She wasn't sure whether to curse Eugenides or the gods.

She had her own demands. Verification of the mark. A treaty, preferably against Sounis. The message held a great deal of calculated language to ensure Attolia had the upper hand at the start of negotiations. She didn't _need_ Eugenides, so long as she established her good-faith attempt to acquire him.

Eddis cursed Eugenides.

* * *

Eugenides was at first too delirious to understand why he'd been moved to nicer rooms than a dungeon. Or why the Royal Physician came daily to see to him. Why the guards in the outer room did not yank his chains or force him to do anything except eat, drink, and generally survive.

In a few days, he lifted his head in confusion born of emerging clearheadedness. Something was wrong. Something beyond the pain in his head, in his body, his missing hand.

He tightened his lips in a grim expression and refused to look at that last.

He considered very carefully how to slip his surprisingly light bonds, but there were the guards, comfortably watching him as though he were a chained serpent and would strike at any time. Instead, Eugenides leaned back and tested them in other ways, calling for water, for food, _whining_.

At the end of a few hours, dark scowls, and many violent threats that were never realized, Eugenides came to the disturbing conclusion that he was not to be harmed.

And he couldn't understand why.

* * *

By the time he properly understood why, Eugenides was once again wholly loathing the Mede who kept him alive and resenting that he had not been hanged.

"You can't be serious!"

Eddis was here, in Attolia, standing in his guarded room, looking carefully coifed and dressed and grim as a soldier as she informed him of his fate.

He cradled his handless arm to his chest and forced the dark night visions from his mind, her voice in his ears, _"Have I exceeded restraints of tradition? Have I offended the gods?"_

For once, he was hemmed into a situation he could not get out of. "Can you get me out?" he asked in a whisper. Shame filled him that he would ever have to ask.

But his cousin only looked grimmer. "Eugenides," Eddis said softly. "She has your mark."

He closed his eyes and despaired, as a man only can who has been betrayed by his own gods.

* * *

He demanded freedom to be with the Eddisian party.

"And have you disappear in the night?" Attolia commented in that dry, sharp way of hers. "You presume much."

He was going to be her King. She would have to give him some leniency at some point. "I won't leave," he promised, voice bitter. "Where would I go?"

"To Eddis."

And offend the gods? He turned toward Attolia, the whisper of her regal skirts, the silhouette of her grace in shadows. It was evening now. She had been visiting nightly, they told him, as if assuring herself of his capture.

"Show me," he whispered.

She stayed very still for a long moment, then to his amazement, she stepped closer into the bright patch of light from a lamp and pulled her sleeve back past the point of propriety until he could make out for himself the matching wine red mark stamped there by the gods.

He was hers and she was his.

He looked up at her, struck again by her beauty, by the memory of innocence she had lost. "I will not offend the gods."

She studied him for a long time, long enough for his neck to ache at the angle he maintained, but he kept staring at her until finally she nodded.

"Very well," she said. "You may join the Eddisian party. If you do go missing," she added, almost as an afterthought, "you may consider our countries at war."

* * *

"Surely this country is a nearly worthless ally," Nahuseresh commented, clearly grudging the attentions she paid Eddis and most of all, the idea of her marrying anyone else for political gain than himself.

Attolia disagreed. "I have discovered a way to make the Thief my tool for the time being. In time, perhaps I may discard him for another. He's not like you, Nahuseresh."

The Mede would not know how blasphemous that idea was, or that she would do no such thing. He considered that and acceded, if still annoyed at the havoc she was wreaking with his short-term plans.

Of course, it was also a given that sometimes queens took lovers, same as kings took mistresses. She could dangle the possibilities in front of the Mede for a long time.

* * *

The talks did not go well. For Eugenides' hand, Attolia quickly realized that Eddis would have gladly gone to war. The Eddisian party hated her one and all, and yet she held indisputable claim on their Thief direct from the gods themselves.

Only Eugenides stared at her from the corner without anger in his eyes. When he was reminded of his hand, she saw his dark glower, but when he looked at her, he was unreadable. It was more comfortable when he leaned back his head, closed his eyes, and didn't glance her way at all.

They fought over every concession, military, trade, or otherwise. At some point, Attolia snapped her displeasure over Ephrata, a harbor she had no interest in ceding sovereignty over, and Eddis looked at her with a clear-eyed vision that bothered her.

"Perhaps we may talk privately for a bit," she said, surprising Eddisians and Attolians alike.

Attolia could not disagree. If they didn't break soon, she would say something she _would_ regret. "The gardens are quite lovely," she said dryly.

Eddis assented with a nod of her head.

* * *

"You don't want to marry Eugenides," Eddis said bluntly after the pleasantries were past.

Attolia nearly stopped cold and raised an eyebrow at Eddis.

"Oh, I know. I should couch it more nicely, but you're as trapped by the gods as he is, and you're trying to make the deal worth it, aren't you?"

Eddis was indeed sharp-eyed.

"Marriage is necessary," Attolia commented, dismissing the accusation out of hand. "I never intended to marry for love."

Eddis smiled, grimly amused. "He does love you, you know."

Attolia nearly recoiled.

"He hasn't reconciled himself to it, but he does." Eddis shook her head. "If he didn't, I would demand an honorable abstention and find some other way to have this treaty if we must."

Eddis wasn't particularly inclined to a treaty, but here she was, openly allowing that this was the will of the gods, and so all of them had to make the best of it.

"I cut off his hand," Attolia said. "He hasn't reconciled himself to that either."

There was no way under the sun or moon or stars that Eugenides loved her. But at least, they could all admit, they didn't have much of a choice.

* * *

Talks went more smoothly, Eugenides nearly destroyed the curtains in his bedroom when he threw the box of hooks and false hands he'd been presented with by the combined will of Eddis' physician Galen and Attolia's Petrus, and Relius laid careful plans and networks of spies in place to handle Attolia's new King.

This was also necessary.

* * *

The gods, the gods, the gods.

She could never love this boy Thief who'd snuck through her palace, lost her face in the court, left gifts as though he were some eligible suitor, then stared up at her awaiting his death sentence with a guileless smile on his face because he was staring at her.

The gods give, the gods take away, and the gods betray him into her hands as if he is the prize she has always wanted. He wasn't that. She had never asked for this.

Eddis couldn't save him, Attolia was no comfort to him at all, and there he was, without a hand, abandoned by his gods, about to be trapped in a marriage to a hostile queen he had never wanted to serve.

He left and she let him go, calling back the guards that would have followed. She let him go and waited while glass windows shattered throughout her palace, waited when both physicians fussed over his injured form, waited with promises to the gods that she wouldn't break this Thief they had given her because he was hers, and her heart ached at the thought of his loss as though—

He was her soulmate. It didn't matter if she loved him.

* * *

He woke and stared at the earrings he once gave her. She was finally wearing them, for the first time, a silent symbol of something she wouldn't speak. He blinked at her softly, then sighed. "I thought you might like them."

Only Eugenides would say that.

He was alive, she thought to herself fiercely. Awake and alive. That's what mattered.

* * *

The gods would make him king. They demanded everything of him: his hand, his queen, his country, his profession; he wasn't even sure he could learn to steal again the way he used to. He was quite certain he didn't want even half of what this treaty would thrust upon him.

But once upon a time, there'd been a girl dancing under the orange trees, and he flushed at his helpless feelings that would not go away.

He looked at Attolia and thought there was only one thing that would make this worth it. "You should know I love you."

She stared at him. "It doesn't matter," she pointed out. "We're marked."

Marked by the gods, marked for life. But Eugenides frowned, insisted, "It matters to me."

She studied him without answering.

He leaned back, considered, and said, "I suppose I'll have to convince you then over the course of our long marriage."

"I suppose you will."

It wasn't his imagination that there was a hint of flush to her cheeks.

* * *

He came to her in the evening on their wedding night, in the tradition of Eddis. For the first time, he seemed to her entirely a man and not a boy. He kissed every part of her, worshipped her slowly, whispering 'I love you' across her body, lingering on her soulmark, and taking far more care for her pleasure than for his.

When her hand lingered where his was missing, he touched her face with gentle fingers and a startled look on his face. "Don't cry," he said softly. "I love you."

She hadn't even noticed her tears before that moment. She kissed him fiercely back. Though she didn't tell him so, she found his argument persuasive.


End file.
